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Posts Tagged ‘solstice’

Standing in the Dark on Winter Solstice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 21, 2025| 2 Comments »

The dark rushes
into my lungs.
With each breath,
I imagine I
become more nothing.
The longer I’m
still, the more
I rhyme with
the vast dark
and know myself
as the mystery
that holds everything.

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Before Winter Solstice, I Remember

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 17, 2024| 5 Comments »


 
 
This, too, is what we are born for,
this waking in darkness, unable
to see, but still able to hear the shush
of wind in bare branches, able to feel
the charge of our heartbeat, the swell
of our belly as it fills with borrowed air.
I have spent my life learning to love
these shapeless hours before the light
finds us, these shadowsome nights when
my whole being seems to stretch beyond
the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home,
beyond the valley, beyond even the globe,
as if I rhyme with the dark all around us,
the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds
this whole swirling spiral of galaxy.
Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness
calls to the darkness inside me as if to say,
remember, remember where you come from,
remember what you are. And the darkness
inside me sings back.

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Dark Night

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on December 22, 2023| 4 Comments »

The long night slips into the room.
It swirls around the dinner table
Night wraps around the light
of the candles. There is nothing
in the home it does not touch.
Even the bright music.
Even the scent
of cinnamon and cloves.
Even the ache.
It travels into our hands,
our dreams, our speech,
our song, our toes.
It becomes us,
becomes the reason we pray,
the reason we learn how to sing.

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On the Winter Solstice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 21, 2023| 9 Comments »

Let’s reach toward each other
with gazes gentle
as midwinter sun—
with a seeing so generous
we can’t help but turn
toward the other
to let ourselves be seen.
There are many reasons
to close, to shut down.
But when we meet
with such light in our eyes,
then we open together
like December dahlias,
soft and many petalled,
open like bird song
after a long, mute night.

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Shift

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 21, 2023| 6 Comments »

On the longest day of the year,
my mother and I sit on her back porch
and wade into worlds where we disagree.
I watch the surface of the lake—
how the reflection changes as day
becomes dusk becomes night,
every moment of it beautiful.
How quiet it is, this shift,
so quiet a woman could miss it.

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Walking into Winter Solstice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 21, 2022| 9 Comments »




Because it is dark
I walk in the dark,
walk with no moon,
walk with the chill
of the measureless dark.
There is peace that comes
from letting the self
be with the world
as it is, and tonight,
it’s a dark world,
a world where I cannot see
far ahead, a world
of silhouette and suggestion,
a world that seems
to cherish whispers
and relish mystery,
a world where
the invitation is
to walk in the dark
without wishing it away,
without championing its opposite,
the invitation is
to be one who learns
how to live with the dark.

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A Few Days Past the Summer Solstice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 24, 2022| 2 Comments »




I find myself storing up on light
   the way pikas store summer grass—
     leaving it out to dry
       in front of their rocky homes.

I store light in poems,
   in photographs. I stand
     bare skinned in the sun
       and store it in memories.

There will be a day five months from now
   when I will desperately want to remember
     how it feels to stand naked
       in the field, held by the warmth

of the sun. So I stand naked in the field,
   and if I were a pika, there would be
     in front of my door a stack
       of golden rays and a dozen

long and sun-drenched days
   and the scent of an almost rain.
     I know the winter is long. I remember.
       I gather more light, more light.

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On the Longest Day of the Year

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 22, 2022| 8 Comments »




There is comfort in knowing
that every year
since the earth was made
there has been
a longest day of the year—
a day when half of all life
wakes to an abundance of light
and then in that moment
of greatness leans again
toward the dark.
There is comfort in knowing
the light comes, the light leaves,
the light comes, the light leaves,
comfort in knowing
all the light that is
reaches toward us,
whether we can see it or not.
It is simply a matter
of staying out of our own way,
and if we can’t do that,
well, that is what patience is for.

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Before Sunrise the Day After the Winter Solstice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 23, 2021| 10 Comments »



 
I don’t know how it is
that before I even open my eyes,
I feel it in my blood—
the small measure of light
that will arrive today.
I marvel how trust in the light
is as powerful
as the light itself.
By the time dawn comes,
already, I am glowing.
 

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One Inner Bonfire

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 21, 2021| 6 Comments »




they invite
new ways of making light—
these longest nights

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